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Symposium to kick off effort to improve electronic health records for physicians and patients

Stanford Medicine will unite leading minds in patient care, technology, design thinking and public policy to help shape the future of electronic health records and at the EHR National Symposium on June 4.

Electronic health records (EHRs), also known as electronic medical records (EMRs), are both beneficial and burdensome in medical practice.

Originally, these systems were intended to empower clinical decision-making and to bring greater context into patient-doctor care conversations. To some extent this has happened, but there is still a long road ahead. Over the last decade, the digital transformation of medical records has mostly served to expedite medical billing rather than to advance clinical care, many physicians say.

“EMRs weren’t built to help doctors provide better care, and it shows,” Dean Lloyd Minor, MD, wrote on his LinkedIn page, continuing:

Today, it’s easier to withdraw money from an ATM anywhere in the world than it is for you to share your complete medical record between your primary care physician and a specialist you’re seeing who is part of a different network… We need to push for a new generation of EMRs that function as seamless digital assistants.

To address this need, Stanford Medicine will unite leaders in patient care, technology, design thinking and public policy to help shape the future of EHRs at the EHR National Symposium on June 4.

Registration is now open for this free event that will address topics including setting a vision for the future of EHRs, improving the patient experience, using artificial intelligence to support clinical decisions and improving data sharing and access while protecting privacy.

The event's speaker lineup includes Don Rucker, MD, national coordinator for health information technology at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; Aneesh Chopra, president of CareJourney and former White House chief technology officer; Marc Harrison, MD, CEO of Intermountain Healthcare; Amy Abernethy, MD, PhD, chief medical officer, chief scientific officer, and senior vice president of oncology at Flatiron; Clifton Leaf, editor-in-chief at Fortune magazine and co-chair of Brainstorm Health; and Natalie Pageler, MD, chief medical information officer for Stanford Children's Health and a clinical associate professor of pediatrics and of medicine at the School of Medicine — among many others.

We'll have coverage from the event here on Scope and we'll be live tweeting highlights on the @StanfordMed Twitter feed.